


Regeneration

by Masterweaver



Series: Massed Ink [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy, Splatoon
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 18:16:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18057569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masterweaver/pseuds/Masterweaver
Summary: Norva'Clemih nar Qwibqwib didn't expect to find anything too unusual on her pilgrimage, even when she answered a distress signal.But then again, earthlings are pretty unusual. Especially when the distress signal comes from a damaged octarian bioship...(A small lyric in a larger verse, to harmonize the melody.)





	Regeneration

Norva'Clemih nar Qwibqwib had encountered earthlings a few times and... well, they seemed friendly enough. A little too eager to try things, and definitely far more casual than the rest of the galaxy, but the inklings almost reminded her of the children back on the fleet--innovative and creative, though perhaps less cautious and definitely far more spastic than a quarian child would be. And if inklings were  _like_  quarian children, an octoling's personality was almost an exact reflection--she half suspected if one got ahold of a child's livesuit they could convince a wandering quarian to bring them back to the fleet by passing themselves off as the offspring of some exile.

So when she traced a distress signal to an octarian bioship, drifting wounded around a small moon, she couldn't help the pang of worry in her chest. Still, she steeled herself, hailing the vessel. "This is the quarian ship Clorvapa, attempting contact with earth vessel Seeking Wild Mass Effects. Please respond, over."

She waited for a moment, watching the oddly tentacled creature floating in space outside her ship's cockpit. There was still the occasional twitch, and her scans showed systems inside running, but from the drip of ink into the stars the thing was not long for this world. She sighed, opening the comm channel again. "Repeat, this is the quarian ship Clorvapa, attempting contact with earth vessel Seeking Wild Mass Effects. Please respond, over."

For a moment, it seemed as though nothing would happen.

Then an eye oscillated open, rolling in her direction. A brief, startled gasp escaped her, unbidden--she knew the eye was there, but actually seeing it was different from merely knowing. It weakly raised a tentacle, pointing at... something, on itself. An airlock, maybe. Or a docking bay. She didn't understand octarian biotech. She wasn't sure most  _earthlings_  did...

...but she  _was_  here now. It didn't look like the ship would survive long without help.

"Stay where you are, Seeking Wild Mass Effects. I'm going to see if I can find a way in and check your computer systems. I should be able to  _assess_  the damage at least..."

Norva glided the Clorvapa toward the ship carefully, mildly surprised when a large aperture opened. Right... the ship was alive.

That would take a bit of getting used to.

* * *

It was a tomb, no doubt about it. Dead earthlings of two, maybe three clades scattered about. Norva had almost vomited when she caught sight of an urchin floating past, skim unweaving slowly in death and dripping ink into the zero-grav void. Ordinary cadevers were bad enough... this was a horror show, and the gun marks on the walls gave her a pretty good idea as to what had happened.

That, and the fact she only found six corpses on a ship designed for a hundred-person crew. Or maybe just ten crew members and ninety passengers. Ships like this were almost self-running, from the way she had heard them described. Of course, most ships like this didn't have doors literally torn open, floors and walls ripped through, machines smashed and pulled out of their sockets.

It was still... slightly conscious, though. She could tell that much from the way the floor gently gripped her feet, giving her an illusion of gravity and easy maneuvering.

"Okay... kind of creepy," Norva admitted to herself. "Let's see though... biological ship, should heal itself in time, if it has the time. What I need to do is..."

She looked at a gash in the wall, bleeding slowly.

"...I have no idea what I need to do. Maybe... maybe there's a computer terminal on the bridge somewhere." Norva steeled herself. "So... that would be near the brain which is... this way, I guess."

She trudged down the hall, carefully noting the doors both whole and... injured. Each wound left her shuddering at the reminder she was inside something still technically alive, which was strange even by most earthling standards. But that was the thing about earthlings, wasn't it? Each clade had their own form of insanity, and each race in a clade would specialize that insanity toward one thing. Limupeds were the eccentric engineers of earth, and octarian biotech was one of the most bizarre things in the galaxy. At least horseshoe crab weaponry made... okay, no, it didn't make any sense, but it could be  _understood_.

"Focus, Norva. The sooner you figure out what's wrong, the sooner you can see about getting this thing to somebody who can fix it."

With another, forcibly calming breath, Norav continued her walk.

* * *

When she finally reached the bridge, Norva couldn't help a small sigh of relief. True, it was as wrecked as the rest of the ship, if not more so, but at least some of the devices here were ordinary technology. Well, as ordinary as earthling tech got, anyway. It was wildly varied, what with mixing more than thirty different species' worth of interwoven culture and technological developments into a mind-boggling concoction of individuality and modularity and  _then_  reverse-engineering some of the super-technology of ancient precursors, all  _before_  they even had mass effect. Oh, and their ink gizmos, couldn't forget those...

"I just need to get to that," Norva murmured apologetically, awkwardly sliding a prawn corpse off a terminal with one finger. She flinched when one of its riblegs snapped off, hovering in the zerograv near her. Her omnitool lit up, linking to the computer as she tried to reboot whatever system was on it. "...okay... power's still there, good... this is... what?"

She stared at her omnitool in disbelief.

"...a system purely to control the onboard music." Norva gave the prawn floating nearby a flat look. "I mean, I know you people take songs seriously, but  _really?_  Keelah..." Her eyes drifted over the playlist for a moment or two, before she set her omnitool to download a copy of the songs. "Well, it might be worth listening to, anyway..."

The next terminal she tried was linked to communications--damaged beyond use, apparently the distress signal was on a separate system. Then star navigation, which was still functional, if useless without the ability to move. Then logistics, with the cargo and crew compliment... Norva let her fingers trail down the list of names, inclining her head solemnly as she downloaded it.

And then, finally, what she was looking for: the internal systems readout. It was a bit unusual, with the inorganic interfaces and systems overlayed over organic chambers and organs, but it was also remarkably precise in determining what was damaged and offering a decent guess as to how each system was broken. A perk of an organic ship, she supposed.

She was about to move on to the next terminal when a new window suddenly sprung up on the screen. Unusual enough, since she hadn't done anything other than look it over, but the words it held made her take a sharp breath.

Unknown Arrival: I am seriously injured. I will die within three days without immediate assistance. Please help me.

Norva ran through some mental calculations. The nearest officially human outpost was two days away... a four-day round trip. She could try to get out a message, but... it would take luck for anyone to arrive in time.

Right now, it was her or nobody.

"Patching up an octarian bioship..." Norva'Clemih nar Qwibqwib looked over the screen with a sigh of resignation. "Well, even if I wind up failing, it'll be something to tell the admirals."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I just had an amusing/heartwarming image in my mind of a Quarian stumbling across a severely broken down and lost Octarian Living ship," said Broken Mirror on Spacebattles.
> 
> "That's a great idea, I'll write it!" said Masterweaver, starting a new fic in a new crossover verse.


End file.
